Syria aspires BRICS membership in future
April 27, 2013, 12:30 pm

Syria is seeking to join the grouping of the emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in the future, Syria’s information minister said on Saturday.

“We would like to become one day the member of such organisations as the BRICS,” Omran Ahed al-Zouabi said at the meeting with Ilyas Umakhanov, deputy speaker of the Federation Council.

The minister said Syria would also like Russia to participate in the country’s reconstruction after the settlement of the Syrian crisis, which has claimed at least 70,000 lives and displaced millions in just over two years.

In the March declaration at the end of the BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa, the leaders expressed “deep concern” over the ongoing conflict in Syria and warned against any further militarisation of the conflict.

Earlier in March this year, President Bashar Al Assad had written to BRICS.

“You, with all the huge political, economic and cultural weight you represent that seeks to consolidate peace, security and justice in the troubled world of today, are called upon to exert all possible efforts to end the suffering of the Syrian people,” Mr Assad said in the letter, as reported by SANA, the official Syrian news agency.

Assad has called the BRICS group “a just force that seeks to spread peace, security and cooperation among countries away from hegemony, its dictates and oppression which have lasted for decades upon our peoples and nation.”

The Syrian information minister also said on Friday that Damascus would agree that inspections of the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria be conducted by Russian experts.

“If there is a need to investigate in a field, we’d offer that to be done by the Russian experts,” the visiting Syrian official told reporters.

57 founding members, many of them prominent US allies, will sign into creation the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on Monday, the first major global financial instrument independent from the Bretton Woods system.

Representatives of the countries will meet in Beijing on Monday to sign an agreement of the bank, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. All the five BRICS countries are also joining the new infrastructure investment bank.

The agreement on the $100 billion AIIB will then have to be ratified by the parliaments of the founding members, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a daily press briefing in Beijing.

The AIIB is also the first major multilateral development bank in a generation that provides an avenue for China to strengthen its presence in the world’s fastest-growing region.